Good Question: How Does U.S. Bank Stadium Keep The Glass Clean?

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — When people see U.S. Bank Stadium for the first time, it’s hard to miss the incredible amount of glass. From the five giant doors to the nosebleed windows to the partitions in the bowl, there’s 200,000 square feet of glass.

So, John from Cottage Grove wants to know: How does U.S. Bank Stadium keep the glass clean? Good Question.

“It takes about four or five guys every single day to handle the glass,” says Ed Reynolds, the stadium’s cleaning service manager. “We keep a team on it all the time.”

Given the newness of the building, Reynolds says people walk up to the outside every few minutes or so to take a peek inside. They often leave nose prints and fingerprints behind.

“They want to look in, and they want to look, and they want to look up and they will put their nose here and so that’s kind of how it’s done,” he says.

Cleaning the lower 10 feet of the building requires much different technology than what’s necessary for up above. Reynolds says the company that handed over the building to him learned a few things about cleaning glass from builders in Dubai. They passed along that information to him. The technology goes far beyond paper towels and spray.

Inside, crews use a triangular tool from 3M that squirts a Scotchgard solution onto windows before wiping them clean. It’s designed to get into every corner of the window. On the outside of the building, crews utilize a power washing tool that uses only filtered water to avoid streaks.

In the eight to nine hours before the doors open for every Vikings home game, 20 people are brought in to clean. In that time, they’ll touch every piece of glass in the stadium.

As for the tall windows, some as high as 270 feet in the air, an outside licensed vendor is brought in. That’s part of a preventative maintenance program that occurs twice a year.

“They tie off at the very top and they have a rope that actually comes all the way down,” says Reynolds. “So they catapult their way down, almost like coming down a mountain.”

They’ll wipe the windows and the beams along the way. It’s similar to washing a skyscraper. The next scheduled cleaning is right after the mid-December Monster Jam event at U.S. Bank.

“They bring tons and tons of dirt in and it just gets thrown throughout the building so it’ll just be all over,” says Reynolds. “That’ll be the dirtiest you’ll see the building.”